Monday, December 8, 2014

Baby Bee is obsessed with the alphabet right now. Well,
certain letters of the alphabet that is. He loves to find the letter “B” on
book titles or packages, and searches diligently for the letter “P” on buses
and billboards. He points out the “W”s in whatever media I’m reading and jumps
in to the alphabet song when we get to “O.” Hearing him attempt to say “alphabet”
is pretty cute too.

Our family recently received a personal helping of Alphabet
Soup. Baby Bee has formally received a diagnosis: ASD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder. We’d
been operating under the informal SPD label (Sensory
Processing Disorder) and figured there was more to the story. The letters
themselves came as no surprise: ASD level 2, with some unofficial words about “highly
gifted” and “cognitive abilities of a four year old in some areas” thrown in.

In our family, A is now for Autism.

We were in disbelief at first. Did we really, finally get
someone to tell us what was going on with Baby Bee? The trend, in working with
families in the early years of life, is to say, “Come back later. In several years.
Let’s wait and see how things turn out. He might catch up. It’s too hard to
sort out right now.” So we were amazed that someone said, “Hey, your kid really
does fit the profile. Here’s some letters for him!”

Then the disbelief turned to joy--help is on the way! We
qualify for therapies specifically designed for kids with ASD, like ABA (applied
behavioral analysis) therapy. Can’t wait to get started!

Now we are in a funny place. We are fighting the insurance
company for the help that’s supposed to be here already and wondering if we
will ever get a good night’s sleep—or a nap during the day for that matter. Plus 3 to 6 months of sitting on service waiting lists seems like a long time when your kid isn't even two. We
are exhausted after all this advocating and realizing that we will probably
have to continue to advocate for everything in the future. We weren't scared to
get a diagnosis, but deep down, a little piece of me thought having a definitive name to describe our lives, meant things would somehow
get easier in their own right.

I think this is the part of the post where I am expected to
tie things up. Loop us back around from A to Z, and say something clever about
Baby Bee being so exceptionally smart and how lucky we are as parents. Or about
how we wouldn't change a thing about him even if we could. Instead, I’ll let
you share in our present discomfort, and you can know that this is where we
truly are right now. Grateful, tired, grieving, hopeful...did I mention tired?

****

As far as the homestead, my energies have focused more on
Baby Bee while Mr. Bee’s been doing most of the animal work. My role is
primarily limited to getting a teenager goat’s head unstuck from the same gate
*every single day.* No small task, I assure you. We’ll post more about those
happenings soon, I hope.